AppleTV & PS3 support in a single movie file (level=41:)
Handbrake is a constant favourite of mine and just about any non-US resident AppleTV/iPod owning individual. So, when I landed a free PS3 I immediately turned to Handbrake to extend my DVD's out to the new toy as well as the trusty AppleTV. Interestingly this wonder of software is not so well known in the Windows world or the console world for that matter. Two cases in point, recently I met an IT Manager at a reasonable sized enterprise who had never heard of it and was seriously about to outlay US$99 for a product. The fact that none of his staff of 6 had heard of it either was surprising as well (they're all in the right 20 something demographic)...
The next surprise was a bunch of hardcore PlayStation 3 friends none of them knew about Handbrake either which meant that there wasn't anyone I could ask how to create a preset that would work for both the AppleTV and the PS3. Why would you want to do this? Well if you've got one of the Sony 1080P TV's that were being bundled with a PS3 earlier in the year you should also have you free PS3 by now!
[By the way you should only use Handbrake on DVDs that you own if the law in your country/territory allows you to, and you should never use it for piracy or theft of DVDs]
Anyone who's used Handbrake will be familiar with all the standard settings available - for most of us the most important ones are the settings for AppleTV, iPhone/iPod Touch, iPod High-Rez (iPod with video -> TV, larger file size), iPod Low-Rez (smaller files, great for iPod screen), PS3, PSP & XBox360...
All well and good unless you're living in a mixed platform household... like me..
If you do a bit of reading you'll find that recent updates of the PS3 software have included support for H.264 video which Mac users should be well and truly familiar with. So shouldn't the default AppleTV settings work? The AppleTV settings clearly use H.264 so it should work shouldn't it? Well... No, Nada, uh uh... not a snowballs chance in hell. Turns out like any good standard you can create lots of incompatible players for a H.264 file.
So the next step was to compare the various settings, and mostly they were similar until you get to the Advanced settings tab and then things get horribly different. The AppleTV has a long string of x264 Advanced Options... f***
However the PS3 Advanced settings were completely different and much shorter...
At this point I realised that there was no way I was going to figure this out without spending more time than I cared to think about just to get my DVD library into a format that both the AppleTV and PS3 would play back. So I spent some time on the Handbrake forums and found two posts (1, 2) that pointed me in the right direction.
Create a combined AppleTV & PS3 setting
For you though it's much easier, open Handbrake and then open the Settings draw - click on the AppleTV setting and your Handbrake window should look like this one below - the only difference is that I've also checked the checkbox for "2-pass encoding". The 2-pass encoding option literally means that Handbrake runs through the DVD twice, on the second pass it uses the statistics and data it gathered on the first pass to produce a better result for your viewing pleasure - of course this means it also takes twice as long.
The next step is pretty simple as well - click on the "Advanced" tab, so that you can see the "Advanced Option String" for x264 encoding, it will look like the window below except for one very small change. You'll notice in mine, that there's a key/data pair at the very beginning of the standard values - simply insert "level=41:" before everything else in the text field.
Saving Settings in Handbrake
Finally, the last thing you'll want to do to make your life easier is save these settings into something you can re-use with a single click (or less).
To save the setting click on the "+" in the bottom of the settings draw, it looks like this;
Fill out the Preset details in the panel that swings down, use a name that makes sense to you, maybe something like this:
Finally if you're like me and only use Handbrake for one thing, click on the "Cog" button (also in the bottom of the Preset draw) and select "Make Default", just like the picture below...
